The Drowned Grid

The old city is a grid you swim instead of walk. Forty years under and the streets are still streets, you can still read them, the water just changed which way is up. I dive it for a living. People up in the new city, the dry city on the ridge, they hire divers like me to go down and retrieve what their grandparents left behind when the water came faster than the warnings said it would. Mostly it is sad small work. A wedding ring in a bedside drawer. A box of paper photographs, ruined, that the client weeps over anyway. I have learned not to promise anything, because the drowned city does not keep its promises, it keeps its silt, and silt is patient and it covers everything in the end. I have worked the grid for nineteen years. I know its currents and its collapsed blocks and its safe routes. I thought there was nothing down there that could still surprise me. That was before the man in the grey coat came to the dock with a photograph and an offer.